


This Race Is a Prophecy

by Mortissimo



Series: And the World Will Live as One [1]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: M/M, Original Character(s), Other, Other Ships Not Mentioned in Tags, Wraith (Stargate)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 09:36:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17764316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mortissimo/pseuds/Mortissimo
Summary: A wraith, lost and found on Atlantis, among old friends, new allies, and older family.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've been writing this for myself for a very long time. There's more to it so far, but it's by no means complete. Do people read OC fic these days?

     The bark was rough against its skin. The forest was without sound, birds having fled as they did when they heard the whine of a fighter. There were humans in the village far away. Its last meal, the soul of a large and stupid animal, sat lethargic in its veins. Impossible or not, it felt the thing inside its feeding apparatus buzz with the proximity of the Hunters, awakening an unignorable kind of anticipation in its blood. In the still of the nighttime, the first snapping branches under the heels of the Hunters were easy enough to hear. It seemed like a long time had passed since the Runner had last drunk the ageless soul of a wraith, though there was no way it could reckon how long. This lifetime.

The Runner drew its crude knife, loose in its left hand. Its right gripped uselessly at the bark beneath its bare feet, steadying but providing no nourishment. Below, the Hunters drew nearer, led by a blinking dot on their shared and foolishly two-dimensional screen, as well as by glimpses of black, of white, of movement, The Runner no longer knew what it did look like, and neither would the pair below it. Without a noise, it dropped down through the branches of its tree. One hand per Hunter: the left's knife into the brain of the lucky one, the right twisting the unlucky down by his hair and, quicker than a snake, the joining. Both cried out, the sound ripped from Runner's throat harsh from lack of practice and animalistic. The Hunter's voice bore words that Runner hardly recognized as words anymore. Senseless pleas, it thought. Pleas or not, the Hunter died quickly enough, and his life sang through Runner's blood as it stood and howled its victory into the night. 

As it crouched again to reclaim its knife, wiping the black-by-moonlight blood on the dead Hunter, it heard a noise behind and froze. Between the blood and the life it was soaked in wraith-smell, but its observer was human. Humans could be as dangerous as wraith to the Runner, but if the human was close enough for smelling he was close enough for shooting. The Runner freed the Hunter's weapon and looked, uncertain of its cover in the dark. The human made a low rumble at Runner, its hand at a weapon at its hip. Sheathed. 

Runner bared its teeth in response and scrambled backwards, its knife sheathed and stolen weapon pointed at the ground. Still the human advanced, smelling nothing like fear. He batted aside the wisps that Runner sent at him like they were nothing more than thought. Which they were, but humans shouldn't know. Humans should run, and leave it in peace, and live. Its heart hammered the inside of its bones, and yet the human advanced, like he was something Runner should know. 

Runner unfolded from its crouch unwillingly, slowly, as the shreds of the wraith it had killed settled in. It ended looking the human in the eye (dark, serious, still unafraid) as the human raised his hand, slowly, to the hilt over his shoulder. Runner stepped back and raised the stolen stunner, but the human's motions were deliberately nonthreatening as he drew the sword from behind his back. He tossed it, low and slow, and Runner caught the sword left-handed. The hilt was rough and familiar under its palm, and foolishly it looked away from the human to inspect it. White silk, hair, braided and wound around crude metal. The handiwork, familiar. It raised the weapon and sniffed, catching an old but still-there echo of its own scent.

" _ Runner, _ " it said suddenly, the word torn out of it rasping and broken. That was his name too. The human. The human shook his head and Runner repeated the word, in the language of the galaxy.

"No," said the human, tall and dark-skinned, smelling of death and life. There was something there, at the edge of Runner's consciousness. It had been so long an animal that it had difficulty even remembering that there were words, let alone which one fit. The one it did remember, its name. Or something like it. The sword had belonged to it, had been made by it, and he remembered the sword.

"Runner," the wraith called Runner said again. He dropped the sword and stepped unconcernedly over it. The human kept his feet planted as the stunner fell into the moss beside the sword. They didn't need weapons, did they? As he drew closer, the wraith breathed in the scent of the human, soaped and scrubbed but still there. The wraith pressed his own right hand to his chest in a muscle-memory gesture of peace, and carefully he reached out with the other to touch the human's skin, his beard, the damp of his lips. 

"Ronon," the wraith remembered with clarity like lightning, and the skin beneath his fingertips split into teeth. The human pulled his hand away and spoke, but the words were too fast and Runner had been too long without words. He scowled his misunderstanding and Ronon stopped. He turned around instead, pulled at the back of his shirt until it slipped up to his shoulders. His skin was smooth, dark in the moonlight, and completely unmarked. 

There was an ugly knot of scars that Runner knew well, that he had tasted and touched and bitten, where Ronon could not cut deep enough and where the Runner had been afraid to try. Where he had remembered fear, seeing the scars and how close they were to pain and death. Or they had been. There was nothing there now.

Runner pressed his fingertips to the spot gingerly, found the hidden lump of one human vertebra, found the next, found nothing between. The wraith stepped back, newly wary. Nothing made sense. Runners were Runners were Runners. There was all running but no escaping, but Ronon was here and clean and unscarred. His clothing was the same patchwork leather he had always worn, but his boots were new. Not wraith. 

"Hunter?" Runner growled when Ronon turned, indicating the downed wraith, and Ronon snarled in response. 

Of course he had taken offense. Ronon would never turn, even if he was asked to, but this was a different Ronon and the wraith couldn't imagine how. He was clean, rested, unafraid, somehow whole in a way Runner was not and could not remember having been, even though he knew better. Ronon held out his right hand to him and Runner mirrored the gesture, holding his left. Ronon shook his head and, warily, Runner extended his right instead. Full of wraith and livestock, Runner still shuddered with want when the human ran his fingers over the slit in his palm, his fingers twitching anxiously. 

But there was something he was supposed to understand from this, Runner realized when Ronon tugged sharply on his arm, and he realized the human had been making words at him again. Carefully, the human turned Runner's hand over and tapped the back, the spot where Runner could forever feel the tracking device. Then he repeated himself, more slowly, and Runner must have been going madder than he thought because he thought he heard the human say  _ Atlantis _ . 

"Alterans?" The human shook his head, and Runner was surprised to feel a spike of disappointment. It had been a long time since he'd felt anything as complicated as disappointment. 

"Humans," the human said. "From  _ Urth _ . Living in Atlantis." 

" _ Urth _ ?" The wraith echoed, puzzled, and Ronon flung a hand behind him.  _ Far away _ . A little black box at the human's shoulder spoke, then, with another human voice. Ronon answered it tersely, then ignored it when it began to speak again, in favor of reclaiming the sword that Runner had given him so long ago. Runner collected the stunner and stood, bouncing from foot to foot, while the human said more things to him he didn't understand. This was the longest he'd been in one place since he'd last seen Ronon, certainly, and already he was itching to Run. The village he'd passed had been large enough to justify a culling to punish him, and even with Ronon at his side there was only so much they could do to fight them off. He missed it, with a keen and sudden ferocity. Runner wasn't sure how he had ever forgotten how it felt to press his back against Ronon's and fight and kill and survive. Other things, too. Silent and furtive. Painful and good, better than anything else had been since the before which he could not remember. 

Ronon grabbed Runner's arm again and pulled him a few steps forward. Runner could lose himself in the human's eyes.  _ Had _ lost himself in the human's eyes, had suffered for it, would do it again. 

"My. Friends. Are. Coming," Ronon enunciated carefully, holding onto Runner's eyes and his arm.  _ Friends _ ? Runner couldn't remember the last time he'd had  _ friends _ . The closest thing he could remember was Ronon, and for so long now he hadn't even had Ronon. 

"Not mine," Runner grated out. Any friend of Ronon's would not be a friend of wraith. It was more than his instincts telling him to Run. "Hunters." 

"They're not–" Ronon started, then caught himself and began again, much faster, too fast to follow. Runner snarled his frustration and tugged at his arm, but Ronon would not yield. 

"They'll help you," Ronon snarled back at last.

"Why?" 

"You helped me. You'll help them."

"Will I?" 

"You helped me," Ronon said again, and Runner bared his teeth.

"You needed it." He had. Large as ever, the human had looked small with exhaustion and hunger. He had not yet learned how to sleep on the Run and lay curled on the ground. Runner had been close enough that their trackers read as one onscreen, close enough to feel the smirk on the lone Hunter. Runner had hamstrung the Hunter and fed before the Hunter could scream, left hand pressed firm enough over the other wraith's mouth to suffocate. When he turned, it was into the barrel of Ronon's curious weapon, but the barrel was trembling. They'd stared at each other a long time, both breathing hard like both had been running, which they had. Runner heard a noise and pulled the human after him, and the human was as fast as he was beautiful, and Runner had remembered what it was like to see another person as a person. He'd wanted to keep the human forever, but the wraith took pains to keep runners from meeting, and they were never allowed to stay together long, only stolen moments that came much later, in caves and behind logs and in the crowns of trees, skin sticky with dirt and sweat and other excretions. 

Then Ronon said something about wanting to stop running that Runner didn't catch all of, because he was busy listening to more humans sneak up on them in the trees. 

"We hear you," Ronon said shortly, too loud to be addressing Runner. Two humans stepped out of the tree line with visible reluctance. Both were smaller and paler than Ronon. One was slender, the other stocky. Both wore black, and both had weapons pointed at Runner, which he did not like, and so he dropped a hand to his knife and growled anxiously. Ronon waved at the two men, but the slender man shook his head with a refusal Runner couldn't understand. 

Ronon then pointed at each of the men in turn and said things that Runner did not understand, or did not hear correctly. When Runner did not answer, he said them again, naming the slender man "Shepherd" and the other man a " _ m'kae _ ."

"Shepherd," Runner repeated at a growl, which for some reason seemed to puzzle the slender man, and then mispronounced the other man's name and watched him wince. 

"Runner," Ronon then named him, in the language of the humans, which rankled at Runner even though he could not very well correct it. The Shepherd asked him something Runner couldn't parse, but he refrained from baring his teeth at the very armed and clearly stressed human. Ronon nodded, though, and held up the wraith's arm, pointing to the back of his hand where the tracker lay. 

"–Eat us?" Asked the  _ m'kae _ , which Runner at least understood.

"No," he answered flatly. "No humans." This seemed to excite them, which Runner felt was a fairly appropriate response. Ronon's hand slipped away and Runner ached to follow it, but it didn't seem worth getting shot full of whatever the aliens' weapons fired. The humans argued amongst themselves for a bit. Runner watched, still shifting his weight back and forth. Shepherd seemed to be the leader, one of those few humans whose name followed their function. Whatever a  _ m'kae  _ was, it seemed to indicate something loud. Also excitable. Though neither Shepherd nor  _ m'kae _ seemed excited about the prospect of taking Runner back to the city of the Alterans, which the Runner found reasonable, they seemed to attach a lot of significance to Ronon's apparent acceptance of him, which was intelligent of them. Their differences did seem to settle themselves eventually, though, because Shepherd lowered his weapon and warily approached Runner.

"Hay their," Shepherd said, and things went downhill from there until he ended with something about a doctor killer, none of which Runner found very encouraging. Head cocked to one side, he looked at Ronon for translation, but the large human was engaged in laughing at  _ m'kae _ .

"'Killer?'" Runner echoed, and Shepherd  babbled incomprehensibly until Runner stopped him with, " _ 'Doctor _ killer?'"

"K _ e _ ller," Shepherd pronounced carefully. "Just. A. Name. She'll–" He gestured at Runner's feeding hand, and Runner flinched it back.

"No," he snarled, and backed up until he felt a hand curl around his shoulder, felt the dense warmth of Ronon at his back. "Your  _ friends _ ," Runner spat at Shepherd and at the ground, left hand wrapped around the hilt of his knife. " _ Not my hand. _ "

"No," Ronon agreed, and turned until he was between Runner and Shepherd. Though whether it was for Shepherd's safety or Runner's, he didn't know. The slight human's weapon was once again pointed at him. "Just the tracker." 

"Your word," Runner hissed, because there was no reason to trust Shepherd and  _ m'kae _ , but Ronon wouldn't lie to him. 

"My word," Ronon agreed, and held out his right hand. Runner did the same, pressing his palm to the soft skin of Ronon's inner arm to the tune of surprise from the alien humans. They shook on it. 

"We should go now,"  _ m'kae _ pointed out, which was both the first whole thing Runner understood from the human and the first reasonable thing the humans had said. 

"Yes," Runner agreed. "Dead world. Not here. More Hunters... The humans." The words were there, he could feel them, but they wouldn't come, and instead snarled his frustration.  _ If you take the tracker out here more Hunters will come and the humans will all die _ , he meant. Ronon said something using most of the words Runner had just used, and the humans nodded, looking startled. 

"Yes," said the Shepherd, and they went. The address they dialed was something Runner didn't recognize, and instead of walking through he spoke into the little black box at his shoulder. A man's voice responded, then a woman, then another woman, then the ring shut down. 

"Meeting Keller there," Ronon explained, then began dialing a planet Runner knew well—far away from other wraith, no humans, few enough life forms of any kind. He hadn't been there since the last time he'd seen Ronon, and while there was always the possibility of Hunters waiting, it was unlikely. When the wormhole engaged, Runner followed them through without hesitation. 

The world was just as desolate as Runner had remembered, the transition from night to blazing day making all four of them wince. They stepped to one side, out of the way of the event horizon, as the ring emptied and then began to glow a second time. Runner had time to watch a small human female exit the wormhole before everything shone red and then went black


	2. Chapter 2

It was dark and cool. There was a faint mechanical sound. The surface beneath was hard but padded. There were no scents in the air but blood. The room was blue and orange, metal and glass, and it was alone. Despite the smell of blood, it felt no pain anywhere but its head. It made to sit up with a jerk, but its wrists caught and tugged it back down. When it looked down it snarled in fury and terror and began to fight the black bands in earnest, tugging at its wrists and twisting to gash at the restraints with its teeth. Too late, the surface it was on gave a warning creak and upended, but the momentum gave it enough strength to rip one hand free, and from there is was simple to rip the other bands to pieces. Still alone in the small, too-clean room, it backed itself into a corner and glanced about wild-eyed for a way out. All its weapons and clothing had been removed, leaving it with thin white garments and a swath of bindings around its feeding hand. With a growl it ripped the final restraint off and flexed its hand, then stopped.

It. He. There should have been something there. Perplexed, it prodded at his hand with his fingertips, frowning until understanding clicked into place.

Ronon. The tracker. Shepherd,  _ m'kae _ and Keller. Atlantis. 

Runner slowly rose to his feet, breathing carefully, and set the table to rights again, although the restraints were probably beyond repair. He made a careful circuit of the room, piling all the torn fragments he'd thrown around back on the bed, and finally stopped in front of a dark mirror that covered most of one wall. It had been so long since he'd last seen his reflection that he'd forgotten quite what it looked like—hair very long and braided, pale, tall, greenish eyes, gaunter than he thought he ought to look. He'd never seen the tattoos over his mouth, either, the ones that would mark him as an exile and a deviant for all and sundry wraith who saw him. Gingerly, he touched the tattoos, expecting them for some reason to feel fresh. 

The wraith remembered his name. 

"Hi." He turned, startled but unalarmed, to see Ronon had snuck in while he had been examining his own reflection. "How you feeling?"

"Better," the wraith said at last, and it was true in every way. "Myself." This was less true. While he knew enough to know he was no runner, the life before still had yet to snap into focus. 

"Is that a good thing?" He supposed Ronon had a point, even if it did sting a little. He  _ was _ a wraith.

"Yes," the wraith said firmly. "My peculiar regard for humanity was a causative factor of my exile, not resultant from it." The look on Ronon's face made the wraith laugh, loud and ringing. It was the first time he remembered laughing. 

"Guess you remember how to talk," Ronon grumbled, trying not to smile. The wraith nodded. "You remember your name?" He nodded again, more slowly.

The wraith told Ronon his name, and immediately despaired of Ronon ever pronouncing it. 

"Guess we'll keep calling you 'Runner," Ronon said after some experimentation, and the wraith flinched involuntarily. "Or not."

"Yes, I–" His heart rate had jumped, just thinking about it. "Please no." 

"Then what?"

"I'll think." 

Then the door slid open again, gratifyingly silently, to admit three more humans: Shepherd, the small woman he had glimpsed before Ronon had shot him and a taller blond human he hadn't met before, who was definitely the one in charge. He gave a bow of deference, somewhere between what he'd give his commander and what he'd give his Queen. 

"Hello," said the leader, while Keller looked anxiously at the restraints that the wraith had destroyed. "I'm Colonel Samantha Carter, currently in command of the Atlantis mission."

"You are not Alteran," the wraith clarified. Carter looked faintly surprised.

"No, we're not. We're humans. From another galaxy."

"Humans from another galaxy?" The wraith was willing to believe many coincidences of evolution abounded, but independently intergalactic humans seemed a little much to swallow. The woman looked like she wanted to laugh, but protocol wouldn't allow her.

"You would not believe how few people think that's weird," Shepherd cut in, his tone and expression flat. The wraith smiled without using his teeth. 

"We can discuss biology later. I don't want you to think you're a prisoner here–"

"But we're gonna treat you like one," Shepherd interrupted again, earning a frustrated look from the woman. "Sorry," he added insincerely, to either or both of them.

"Given the unusual levels of trust Ronon seems to have in you, I'm willing to give you far more freedom than any other wraith–" Here she shot Shepherd another inscrutable look "–would have in Atlantis. However, when outside your assigned quarters, you will still need to be accompanied by at least one member of Colonel Sheppard's team at all times. You are not permitted in the gate room or any other sensitive areas unless absolutely necessary. If we find you alone, or anywhere you shouldn't be, you will be escorted back to your room the first time. The second time, we'll shoot you. You are  _ definitely _ not to go near any computers or other equipment without  _ very explicit permission _ given under  _ very dire need _ ." Another look exchanged, and clearly the wraith had missed something here, but it was not a linguistic problem. Perhaps he simply had to have been there. "When you are around other people you will wear restraints at all times. It goes without saying that if you feed on any humans, you will be shot."

"I won't," he said, absolutely truthfully, to unimpressed looks from everyone but Ronon. 

"That's a relief," said Carter tensely. "Any questions?"

"Do you have many wraith on Atlantis?" The wraith wasn't sure if it was a good question or a bad one, because all and sundry immediately flinched. 

"A few," Ronon added. "It didn't work out."

"Did you shoot them?" 

"Unfortunately, no." None of them seemed inclined to explain any further, so the wraith let it drop. 

"How exactly will I be helping you?" 

"That has yet to be determined." Although he hadn't laid a finger on her, it seemed as though the conversation with the wraith was physically draining the life out of Carter. The longer they spoke, the wearier she looked.

"I was once skilled at genetic manipulation. I have recently acquired some skill at... Guerrilla warfare," he approximated helpfully. 

"We'll discuss that later. Anything else?" It couldn't possibly be his fault that he made the commander so uncomfortable. And he seemed to make her  _ very _ uncomfortable.

"Yes. We have established that I will not be feeding on humans." Which suited the wraith fine. "Do you have livestock, or pris–" That was certainly the wrong thing to say. The wraith's teeth clicked shut in the middle of what he had imagined to be, from their perspective, a reasonable suggestion, as the humans all grimaced as one. 

"We will discuss that later as well," Carter snapped and left, followed by the still-silent Keller. 

"I hope not too much later." This he addressed to Sheppard, who was much more difficult to read but looked no happier than the other Colonel had. 

"Why, how long have you got?"

"Standard month, perhaps."

"Five weeks," Ronon translated.

"That should give us plenty of time." He pushed away from the wall, still unhappy, but paused with his hand hovering over what the wraith assumed was the door control. "There is another possibility." The wraith waited, and Sheppard turned again to face him fully. "There's a way we can pretty much take care of the feeding thing permanently. It makes you kinda human, but..." Here the human paused, apparently misinterpreting the wraith's wide-eyed look. "You know what, forget it."

"Wait." Sheppard was still armed, or else the wraith would have started shaking him to get the information out faster. "How human is a 'kinda?'"

"Pretty human." Sheppard paused. "Human. And you lose your memories. And you have to keep taking it or you turn back."

"Fascinating."

"You want to try it?" He didn't sound hopeful.

"No, but I would very much like to take a look at your work. Long ago, I tried something similar." Similar, opposite. Whether it was making wraith more human or humans more wraith was immaterial, the point was that someone had apparently got closer to what Scholar had always wanted than he'd ever managed himself. 

"Really," Sheppard said, and once again there was an edge to his voice, like Scholar had missed something he had no hope of picking up on. "We'll see." A tinny voice in the human's ear piped up, and he turned away to take the message, leaving Ronon staring at Scholar.

"What?"

"When I shot you, you  _ couldn't talk _ ."

"So you did shoot me." Scholar grinned.

"How are you just... Fine?" The human spread his hands, bewildered and angry, and Scholar forced himself to calm down a little. Of anyone, Ronon knew most of the pain that was a runner's life. There were scars in Ronon that went deeper than the skin, that no Gift could hope to heal.

"I am not," he said truthfully, too quiet for the talking Sheppard to hear. "I remember little. My head hurts. If I wake up to find myself strapped down again I will kill someone. I feel naked without my weapons. I have gone from trusting no one to having the trust of no one, and I can't decide which I like less." Ronon's hand spread large and warm on the back of his neck, and Scholar shivered. "But I am in the city of the Alterans, my previous life's research may soon be handed to me and you are alive." It was nearly ideal, but some things hurt too much to want. Ronon thumbed a knob of his spine, and Scholar's knees turned watery. "I adapt," he said simply. Across the tiny room, Sheppard delicately cleared his throat. 

"Your quarters await," he said, and with the slightest bit of tamped-down glee held up what Scholar could only assume were more restraints. "Let's go."

After Sheppard's expression, Scholar had imagined they might parade him down the hall like he was a spoil of war, but the corridors they did go through were surprisingly empty. The people they saw kept their eyes on the floor, or whatever else they were doing. Whether they were cowed by him, or Ronon, or whatever specter there was of the city's last wraith visitor, Scholar could only speculate. They left him in a largely empty room in a largely empty hallway. The only apparently occupied room in the hall belonged to Ronon, and Scholar suspected it was a recent move. In the room, Sheppard had removed his restraints, given Scholar a very similar warning to the ones Carter had given, and left, unfortunately taking Ronon with him. 

The walls were dark grey-blue, like the rest of the city seemed to be. There was a yellow-paned window, and a second door that led into a smaller room with an array of devices both literally and figuratively alien to Scholar. Inside the slightly larger room, there was a narrow and unfriendly looking bed, a chair and a small table with a worn rectangular object on it. When Scholar picked it up gingerly, it spread out into individual leaves in his hands, bound together along one edge. Though the outer surface was slick and brightly colored, the inside pieces were white with black marks in irregular patterns. Looking for some kind of clue, he looked at what he assumed to be the front of the relic. Yellow, blue and pale red stripes ran along the edges of a white field. Inside the boxes were more black marks and a two-dimensional depiction of a very juvenile human. He would have suspected it of being left behind by the last person who had inhabited these quarters, but while the item smelled of many things, the room smelled of nothing but disuse. It must have been left for him, Scholar reasoned, but the logic behind it would take some consideration. 

The world outside the yellow window grew dark, and the lights inside the room rose, as Scholar continued his examination. After some time, he glanced up to find his room occupied again, by Ronon and the squishy one, visibly nervous.

"They decided to— What are you doing with that?" 

"Guessing," Scholar admitted. "It seems to be a crude vehicle for information, possibly derived from plant matter. Its structure would suggest a sort of lexicon, but the illustration of a juvenile human suggests relation to that subject. My nearest guess is some kind of guide to diseases affecting young humans." Ronon snorted, Scholar guessed in amusement.

"What?" McKay's expression didn't seem to know what it was doing. "No, it's— It's a baby name book. For naming babies. Someone–probably Sheppard–left it here as a joke."

"Your society has very complicated guidelines for naming your young." Scholar was impressed, in a way, with the sheer stupidity of requiring such a vast tome to be applied to such a pointless endeavor. "I fail to see the relevance."

"They're not  _ guidelines _ , they're suggestions. Some people have trouble thinking of good names for their kids."

"Meredith Rodney," Ronon said under his breath.

"Shut up," McKay snapped without missing a beat. "It's funny because you people won't tell us what your names actually  _ are _ , and we're running out of good ones to give you."

"I will be sure to select something appropriate." Once he figured out how to read the symbols the Earth people used as writing. It seemed, like the wraith writing, not to be based on pictographs, which was a blessing. McKay continued to give him a complicated look for a moment, then flapped his hands as though to clear the air of unnecessary conversation. Scholar smiled.

"Anyway, they decided you get to see the retrovirus project after all, so here." Scholar set aside the baby name book as McKay extended a thin rectangular device to him. When he touched it, a screen lit up, and Scholar flinched back in shock. It had been so many years since he'd been presented with a block of text he could actually  _ read _ . Something in his own script. At some point after that, the humans must have left, but the information itself was too engrossing for anything else to hold his attention. After some time, he reached the end and began again, checking back against the Earth language for some kind of introduction to translation. It must have taken some time, but if he was disturbed he did not register it. 

Of course he'd known of the origins of his species; all wraith knew where they came from. But he'd never heard of a human taken by an insect living long enough to experience mutagenic side effects, and he certainly never would have thought to try blocking the distinct gene expressions from the insectoid branches of the wraith's family tree. Then again he'd never sought to turn wraith into humans—quite the opposite. Perhaps it would have been easier if he'd considered using the progenitor insects, but that was all in the past now. 

It really was a pity, he thought, that the humans had never managed to get past the initial experimental stages and into a real trial of the procedure. It did disturb him a little that they'd offered him an untested procedure that might as likely kill him as humanize him, but whatever else the Earth people were, it seemed they were not particularly nice, and Scholar didn't exactly disapprove. Reality was a bad place to be nice.

When Scholar came up for air after the second read-through, the room spun gently around him, which he took to be a sign it was time to stop reading for a while and think. He set the data device alongside the book on the desk, and lay back on the narrow bed to stare up at the ceiling. 

 

He slept, perhaps. Dreamed of creatures with human faces and wraith souls, knotted together, screaming up at him. He must have slept because he awoke later, abruptly. Ronon lay beneath him, the floor beneath Ronon. There was cold metal pressed hard against his temple and alien anger in his ears. He sat up and pressed his hands to his own chest in surrender, climbed ungainly up so the human could stand. 

"You startled me," he guessed blandly, based on available data.

"You were unresponsive for three days and asleep for two." Sheppard's voice next to him and therefore Sheppard's weapon at his head. "We were starting to get worried." This afterthought, flatly sardonic. In front of Scholar, Ronon's expression told him nothing. 

"I was thinking." Slowly, Scholar sat back down on the bed, and nobody shot him, so he assumed he was in the clear in that regard. Although he tried not to let it show on his face, Scholar found it deeply disconcerting that he'd fallen so easily into a trance and then into hibernation. After hardly sleeping more than a handful of nights for fifty years, he–

Ronon shook his shoulder. 

"You keep fading out." At some point the large human had crouched so they were eye level again. The pressure at his temple had gone away. "You sure you're not gonna need to–"

"No." He'd gone longer than five days. Ronon's estimation of five weeks sounded about right on the galactic scale as well as by the measurement of whatever system he was currently in. Ronon's knees were the closest parts of him, familiar worn brown leather. Warm under Scholar's left hand. His right still pressed against his own heart because somewhere in the room, Sheppard was anxious and armed and mistrustful. When Ronon stood, Scholar's hands fell back into his lap. He still wore the thin white garments he had woken up in, he supposed, five days ago. 

"How far did you get in the research?" The woman's voice was unfamiliar, but when he turned and looked he recognized Doctor Keller, standing by the door with a large black case at her feet. 

"Yes." No, that wasn't quite right, but today the words were evading him. "All of it. Why didn't try–" Scholar looked down at his hands, laced together in his lap. If he had to remember how to speak every time he woke up, this was going to be difficult. 

"Are you–"

"Why didn't. You. Try it." 

"We did," Keller said, clearly puzzled. When Scholar looked up, Sheppard was in the middle of signaling something at her. "Oh."

"I can only do so much with incomplete data," he spat, then stopped. It was exactly what he had meant to say. 

"We're still not great at the whole 'trust' thing," Sheppard drawled accurately. "Suffice to say the experiment didn't go all that well."

"The memory loss was temporary."

"Yes."

"And your unwilling experimental subjects turned on you once they realized what you had done to them." No wonder they hadn't wanted to tell Scholar that part. Just thinking about it, he was sure he bristled like an angry animal. 

"Yep." Briefly, he considered telling them about his own experiments, so many years ago. How he had gone from planet to planet, begging volunteers. How the humans had run from them, had shot at them, but eventually, had listened to them. How they had been refused at first but then, slowly, how they had collected curious humans. How he had known their humans, had known their names and their planets and their former lives. How the humans had died when they had been discovered. 

There was a name on the tip of Scholar's tongue, an important name. The most important name. It would not come. 

"Hey." A loud noise, Sheppard clicking his fingers in front of Scholar's face. "Atlantis to... Wraith guy." 

"You didn't try it on me, did you?" He didn't think he'd looked more human than wraith, but then again he couldn't remember what he had looked like. And Sheppard had said it wore off.

"No. Why?"

"Trouble remembering." It had been hundreds of years ago, his plan. And he hadn't been alone. He had never been alone, until... Something. Scholar couldn't recall. Sheppard looked at Ronon, but Ronon shrugged.

"I had more trouble not remembering," he said roughly, watching the window instead of Scholar. 

"People react to psychological trauma in different ways," Keller ventured. She drew back when Scholar turned to look at her.

"Thank you." Scholar realized suddenly he hadn't said it before. He wouldn't want the Lanteans to think he was rude. 

"For what?" Smiling, he held up his right hand, tapped the back with his left. There was no scar, but of course there wouldn't be. "Oh. You're welcome. I guess." He supposed he could also thank her for thinking of him as a person, but he didn't want to start a sarcasm fight with Sheppard. Scholar had the feeling he wouldn't win. Apparently more unnerved by Scholar's politeness than his irritation, Keller picked up her case and left without so much as a farewell. Sheppard made to follow but paused, at the door.

"Are you gonna tell us your name?"

"You lack the anatomy to pronounce it," Scholar said truthfully. Another reason he imagined waking up to find oneself a human must be terrifying. "When I can read it, I will find one in the book you left." Sheppard's expression seemed at war with itself, reminding Scholar strongly of McKay. 

"Good," Sheppard settled on at last. "Ronon, you coming?"

"In a minute." As Sheppard left the room, Scholar shifted minutely towards the head of the bed, leaving an explicit invitation to sit. Ronon did not.

"There're cameras," Ronon said shortly. They'd never discussed what they were to one another. There had never been time, and most of their too-brief encounters had been silent anyway. Or wordless, if not soundless. 

"But they can't hear."

"No." Ronon shifted his weight uneasily, but would not sit. 

"Now that you are safely among humans again, you no longer...?" What should Scholar say? If they'd both been wraith, or both human, there would have been no asking. If he'd been human, they wouldn't be watched, but they'd certainly both be dead. Not a good trade.

"I haven't decided." It was far more generous than Scholar had been expecting, actually. He'd imagined a more obvious dismissal. "Do you?"

"Always." Scholar had always felt that  _ Gift of Life _ was not a strong enough term for it, forcing your soul into another's. He was consistently surprised that even among the so-called 'worshipers,' the Gift was rarely received with as strong a feeling as it was given.

"Earlier, when I 'startled' you. You didn't feed." 

"I would never. You are Hive." The speed of Scholar's response surprised him as well as, it seemed, Ronon. The large human approached the bed and Scholar stood, toe to toe and eye to eye.

"I wish you weren't a wraith." It wasn't what Scholar was expecting Ronon to say. He wasn't sure what he had expected Ronon to say.

"I do not." Ronon nodded, once, and then stepped away. Immediately, Scholar missed the smell and human heat of him.

"See you later." The room was empty again, containing only Scholar, the furniture, the book and the data device. And one more thing, on the desk beside the book: a neat square of folded grey and black. When he shook it out, he found clothing not unlike what Sheppard had been wearing. Boots, on the ground beside the desk. He stood, silent, and looked at these literally alien objects. It didn't seem they had made Ronon change his clothing, though from the smell they had cleaned it. And yet Scholar was left this uniform in the place of the scavenged tatters that were all he had owned before. He wouldn't miss them, he thought, but with a sudden fierceness he missed what they used to be. The sturdy black, the sweeping skirts, the faint glitter in sunlight. A sudden ache of longing to rejoin the people who had so thoroughly abandoned him, sharp enough it made him weak.

" _ I'm sorry _ ," he said aloud, in his own language, to someone he couldn't quite recall. 

Scholar removed the thin white garments and replaced them with the black and grey. Forearms and throat still exposed, though he supposed for humans it was a fairly conservative uniform. At least they were of a more appropriate color, not that he'd likely be dealing with anyone who knew better than the humans who had dressed him in white in the first place. White clothing folded on the desk, he sat at the chair and picked up both the book and the device. 

Since it seemed studying the data alone was not exactly good for him, Scholar worked instead on comparing the Earth text to the wraith translation. 

The humans once again left him alone for a long time. 


	3. Chapter 3

This time he heard the door chime, an unnecessary but welcome nicety.

"Enter," he allowed, and Sheppard did.

"How's it going?" Sheppard asked, from just past the threshold. The doors  _ woosh _ ed shut behind him. 

"I have a solid guess as to the phonology of your written language, thanks largely to the effects of ring travel, no doubt. I have yet to select an appropriate name but I have not yet finished reviewing the full candidacy."

"Oh." Sheppard did amble closer, as if magnetically drawn by confusion. "You do know that was left here as a joke, right?"  _ Was left _ . Passive voice. Not claiming responsibility.

"Yes. McKay told me." 

"I just, you know. We all thought you might want to be looking at the research on the retrovirus." He did not have the large gun today, Scholar noted. The only weapon visible was the small gun at his waist. Perhaps it was a precaution, and perhaps weapons were merely customary among males of his culture. 

"I did. I have learned all I can without experimentation, or being allowed to review the documents from the previous experimentation." Though Scholar tried not to let the crossness too strongly into his voice, he suspected it got there regardless. Humans always thought wraith sounded a little angry anyway. 

"That's actually what I wanted to talk to you about. You said something before, about having done something similar?" Scholar supposed now would be the time to find out if full disclosure was a good idea or a fatal one. 

"Yes. More or less. I was attempting to introduce wraith characteristics to humans, but the work required a similar body of knowledge. I had not considered using the progenitor insects, which in retrospect seem like an obvious choice, but..." Sheppard had a hand on his gun and was looking, to Scholar's eyes, as alarmed as Sheppard got.

"That was  _ you _ ?" Scholar set the book down and stood.

"If I say yes, are you going to execute me?"

"Probably not, but we'll see." That, Scholar believed, was sarcasm. "You're the one who tried to make humans more wraith."

"Essentially." He wasn't the  _ one _ , was he. He was one of two, but he couldn't  _ remember _ , and it was driving him out of his mind. 

" _ Why _ ?" Scholar grimaced reflexively. Of all the things he wouldn't mind not remembering again, the myriad times he was asked this question took the top tiers. He couldn't even remember if any of his answers had been the truth, or if they'd all matched the official records he'd kept at the lab. 

"Sentient creatures are more dangerous as a source of sustenance than they're worth. Studies of human populations had found increasing tendencies to self-regulate, as well as an inexorable drive toward industrialization and increased lethality. But alternative sustenance will never be fully explored as long as humans continue to appear to be an easy source." Beyond that, there was poetry. Art. Music. The infinite capability of the human soul. 

"You're a  _ vegan _ . You're a  _ militant vegan _ !" 

"I don't–"

"Humans who don't eat meat or anything because they think it's cruel because they like animals better than people. And they think nobody else should either." 

"Animals do not independently develop arts and sciences," Scholar said stiffly, his hands tense at his sides. Colonel Sheppard seemed to say everything with a mocking edge, so perhaps it was not Scholar he found amusing. Perhaps. At least he took his hand back off his weapon. 

"Um. Sorry." The apology did surprise Scholar. He hadn't realized he bristled quite so visibly, and tried to force himself to relax a little. "It's just kinda surprising. Also, the archives said something about trying to create a more edible human." Sheppard made a face, though whether conceptually disgusted or disgusted by poor word choice, Scholar couldn't say.

"There is what one puts in official reports to an unsympathetic Queen, and then there is reality." 

"Ain't that the truth," Sheppard muttered, over Scholar's sudden realization.

"You  _ found my archives _ ? I assumed they were destroyed along with the. Subjects." Sheppard was squinting at him, making Scholar feel once more as though he had missed something.

"What, exactly, happened towards the end there?" 

"We were investigated. They did not like what we had done. We were spared. My research... Was destroyed." Even now, he wasn't sure if he could accurately call the humans and their children he had known for a hundred years his friends. The mind shied away from it, knowing he had murdered them, but the feeling was still there. Scholar sat again, carefully.

"You assumed." Scholar looked up. He wouldn't have thought humans were capable of such a broad range of smugness, but apparently it wasn't so much a wraith trait after all. 

"I was not present for its destruction."

"It was not destroyed. And neither, I hope you're pleased to know, were the 'subjects.' Well, not completely. A lot of them were. But some survived."

"You have encountered their descendants," Scholar surmised.

"One of them. She lives here, in fact." 

"Fantastic." Scholar was aware that he was grinning, and that he probably ought not to, since it tended to bother humans, but he couldn't really stop. "Does she have any visible wraith characteristics?"

"Nope." He couldn't tell what Sheppard thought of this line of questioning, but Scholar didn't especially care. "Just telepathy."

" _ Fantastic _ ," Scholar breathed. "May I meet with her?"

"That... May not be a good idea."

"She is not pleased to be related in any way to the wraith." Sheppard clicked his fingers, smiling like it was a performance.

"Got it in one."

"I would be pleased to meet her regardless."

"I'll let her know." Sheppard glanced down at the desk with its paltry array. "I'll see if I can't find some other reading material. And something to write with. Do wraith have pens?"

"I am familiar with pens."

"I'll see if I can't find something to write with too."

"Thank you." Sheppard nodded, and left. Scholar levered himself over to the bed and lay down on his back. All this time, he'd assumed the humans had been destroyed. He'd never thought to look for them, even when... Even when... Scholar raised a hand to his face and realized he was shaking. 

" _ I killed you _ ," he said to nobody, the hisses and clicks sounding strange in this alien room. " _ I'm sorry _ ." 


	4. Chapter 4

    There was softness under him and warmth over him and leather under his hands. A human mouth at his throat, teeth blunt. Human hands against his spine, beneath the synthetic fabric. The wraith do not have these kinds of dreams unless they are shared with another wraith. Wraith do not dream at all unless the dreams are messages. Scholar could not be dreaming, but he could not be awake, because this was Atlantis, and everything was different between them.

    Scholar opened his eyes. Ronon was a solid presence against him still, hair lying across Scholar's face, face buried against his shoulder.

    "Did they stop watching?" He slid his hands from Ronon's thighs to Ronon's waist, gripping tighter with his hands as his words pushed away.

    "I stopped caring." Ronon kissed him again, in the human way, mindful of Scholar's teeth, and Scholar let his eyes slide shut.

 

    Ronon was still there, but likely not for long. Massive body curled over itself in the chair, back to Scholar. Tying his boots. He'd replaced his shirt but on his bare arms were fading red marks from Scholar's claws. Scholar grinned at them. They'd never left marks on one another before, but he could feel more than see a bite at the base of his neck. Before, they'd parted with the Gift, leaving Ronon free of any recent wounds and him searching for the next Hunter to sink his claws into.

    "Come spar with me." There'd never been time to lie together after, either. This was the first time Scholar had slept beside Ronon. It had been simply too dangerous in the past, for them to blend together their tracker signatures for too long. Scholar could not remember Runner having slept at all, which perhaps explained his present lethargy.

    "What is that?"

    "Practice fighting."

    "Who are we fighting?" It seemed dangerous to engage any of the humans while so few of them seemed even willing to speak to him, but if Ronon thought it was a good idea then he was probably right. Scholar pushed himself up and began to rebraid his hair, the motion more reflex than thought.

    "You're fighting me."

    "Why?" Braid tied off, Scholar rolled off the narrow (though, as it happened, not too narrow) bed and began to pull on the thin human clothing.

    "Burn off nerves. Thought this would do it. Hasn't."

    "I see."

    "Anyway, can't have you getting rusty. Someday they might let you back off the city."

    "Someday," Scholar echoed ironically, but he smiled. It was difficult to remain too angry about anything just then. Dressed, he hoped, in the correct manner, he stood before Ronon and presented his wrists. Ronon stared for a moment, not comprehending, then swore under his breath as realization dawned.

    "Hang on," he said, standing. "I need to get restraints from Sheppard."

    "Of course." They were eye-to-eye now, but it seemed the wrong moment for a human kiss goodbye. It was certainly the wrong moment for the Gift, if the humans meant to put Scholar on a starvation diet. Still, Scholar needed something to anchor himself. He reached out and laid his right hand over Ronon's heart, then dropped it as the human turned to go.

    "I'll be back in a sec," Ronon said and left. Scholar sat back on the bed, wondering what or how long a sec was.

 

    It seemed he waited a very long time, alone in the small room, before someone came for him. He _felt_ her coming as soon as she stepped out of the transporter, rose to his feet and folded his hands together in front of him. When the door chimed, which he did not expect, he called for her to enter, and she did.

    She was smaller than he was expecting, half a head shorter than he was. Dark-skinned and copper-haired, dressed in a combination of Earth clothing and her own. She met Scholar's eyes unflinchingly, with the kind of cool self-possession and complete fearlessness he would expect from a queen, and Scholar bowed to her as he would a queen. On the surface, her thoughts gave away nothing, and Scholar did not pry.

    "I am Teyla Emmagan," she told him.

    " _I am Scholar_ ," he told her, aloud in his own language and, for the first time in half a century, in the mind as well. If the psychic communication startled her, it did not show on her face.

    "I understand you made me what I am." She was not afraid, she was _angry_. Even without prying, Scholar could feel the anger rolling off of her. It was an old anger, probably reawakened by his presence.

    "I am responsible for the smallest part of what you are, Teyla Emmagan." Genetically as well as in every other sense, he supposed it was true. After as many generations as had passed, the small lines of wraith DNA must have gotten chipped away by inheritance, and even at their strongest gene expressions were only the smallest parts of what made people. Whether it was  by his face or his words or his mind, Teyla did seem surprised at that.

    "You are not what I had expected," she admitted, taking a few steps away from the door, inside the room.

    "You are." It was not quite right. _Expected_ was not quite the right word; _hoped_ was probably closer but implied a likely disturbing degree of prescience. "Sedwin?" She really did look surprised at that. It was not an expression that settled readily into her features.

    "That is an old family name. Yes." She took another step and then paused, pulling something from behind her back and tossing it to Scholar. "I hope you are not offended, but..." He unrolled it. Black, synthetic material, metal down the center.

    "I don't understand."

    "It was made to be a brace for a broken wrist."

    "I see." Scholar laid the metal against his right palm and inner wrist, put his thumb through the hole, tightened the straps. The pressure was not comfortable, but not painful. A bit like a too-tight high collar. A second object flashed silver through the air and he caught it in his left hand. These, he recognized as the restraints Sheppard had placed him in before, and dutifully he clicked them shut around his wrists. When Scholar looked up, Teyla was closer than he would have expected her to be willing to come. She seemed unarmed, but from what he recalled of the Sedwins, that was not much of an issue on her world.

    "I would not have expected you to learn their names." Teyla picked up where they had left off, as though the interlude of locking up had not happened.

    "There is much you do not know of the wraith." It was a common enough expression, among deviants like Scholar who deigned to speak to humans like they were people. Not many deigned further to teach, and few of those survived when their human students turned on them. Vicious cycle.

    "So it would seem." Teyla turned the chair around, so it faced the bed, and sat. She touched a hand to her ear, hidden beneath the fall of her hair. Scholar sat on the bed, hands by necessity in his lap.

    "I would like to ask you some questions," Teyla began. Scholar made to spread his hands to show openness, brought up short with a _clink_.

    "What I remember is an open book," he qualified carefully.

    "I assume you had not always been a Runner." Scholar grimaced and shook his head.

    "No."

    "How long?"

    "Fifty years, I think. It is difficult to accurately reckon time alone and moving from world to world."

    "Why were you made a Runner?"

    "I don't recall." There was a feeling, like someone knocking at the back door to his mind, that Runner had not felt in a long time. Teyla's expression did not change, but he assumed his answer did not please her. "I don't. I'm sorry. It's. Something to do with the alteration project. I think." It tasted like the static of a poor connection in the back of his teeth. Like holding open a healing wound with his fingernails. "I'm sorry."

    "It's fine." When he glanced up, Teyla's expression was smooth again, but Scholar had the feeling he had just missed something. "Will you return to your hive?"

    "No. My queen will not allow it."

    "What if she does?"

    "She won't." Scholar touched his marked lips, aware of the gesture trailing his attached other hand after like a dead animal. "I have no more hive."

    "Those markings explain your status?"

    "Essentially, yes."

    "So any wraith who see you will know what you have done."

    "No." What Scholar had done was literally unheard of. It was beyond any other wraith's imagination, and therefore there was no cultural shorthand for it. "They will know that I have no hive."

    "Do you wish to remain on Atlantis?"

    "Very much." Scholar smiled, showing teeth, and remembered too late that this was not always polite or advisable around humans. Teyla did not seem troubled.

    "Why?"

    "It is the city of the Alterans. They had great power and knowledge, of which they shared little with humans and less with wraith."

    "You admire them."

    "Yes."

    "Did you fight them?"

    "Alas, no. Two millennia too young."

    "You admire them but you wish that you had fought them?"

    "I wish that we had worked with them to find another solution to our hunger, but we fought instead. One foolish dream would seem to be enough without compounding it."

    "Do you have any allies?" The question twisted hard at something buried in Scholar's soul. He covered the flinch by clearing his throat, but it was a courtesy. There was no chance Teyla had not seen it.

    "Ronon." Anyone else, particularly the Lanteans, was an unknown quantity.

    "Is that the extent of your connection? Allies?" They were being listened to, Scholar realized.

    "Obviously not. Is he going to be executed?"

    "Of course not!" Teyla rearranged her features from something much less friendly into something approximating her previous expression. "The people of Earth have some... Strange ideas of what should govern interpersonal relationships, but... No."

    "Exiled?"

    "No," she said firmly, with a glance to the grey box above the door to Scholar's room. "Ronon _will not_ be exiled either. He has _in fact_ broken no rules, merely a poorly defined code of conduct." They were definitely being listened to, and Scholar did not envy the intended recipients of Teyla's scorn.

    "Good," he answered, and meant it.

    "Have you truly never fed on a human?"

    "I did not say that. I have not always believed as I do now."

    "Why did you change your mind?"

    "Humans." Scholar shrugged helplessly. "Humans independently develop art and science on every planet they are left to colonize without frequent culling. Nearly every human settlement I have seen has invented poetry, most without outside influences. If allowed to grow they take wildly differing paths to interstellar exploration but most societies will tend that way even when they have had no sure contact with any other races. Even the idea of another somewhere is enough to draw them to the stars. We wraith are as closely related to humans as humans are to Alterans, and yet we consider humans _livestock_. It is unthinkably stupid."

    There was silence in the small room. Scholar regarded Teyla carefully, but he could not read her expression, and would not press to read her mind.

    "Will you help us?" She asked finally.

    "I do not understand the question. Will I help you do what?"

    "Will you help us fight the wraith?"

    "Will I be a footsoldier in your war? I don't think you want me to, I am not a skilled soldier. Will I be an assassin? It depends on the target. Will I help you commit genocide against my own people? Of course not. Will I help you commit genocide against your own people? Of course not! Will I help you weaponize your experimental retrovirus? I believe it will never be effective in its intended use. I will try, but I will not kidnap unwilling subjects, and if experimenting on myself permanently damages or kills me, then I suppose that will be the end of my contribution." It got easier to respond, actually, knowing that he was being interrogated. It was by far one of the less unpleasant interrogations Scholar had ever suffered through.

    "Would you go that far?"

    "Perhaps. If I believed I did so with any hope of success."

    "Would you now?"

    "Certainly not."

    "Would you assist us fully against non-wraith threats?"

    "I don't presently see many obstacles. Yes. With the caveat that I have never found an extinction that I approved of."

    "In that we are more or less alike." Teyla still met his eyes readily, but there was little mistaking where the 'more or less' lay. When she rose to her feet Scholar rose with her, head-and-shoulders above but reflexively hunched as though in apology.

    "Give me your word that you will attack no Lantean in Atlantis," she commanded, inside and out. It couldn't have had a stronger effect if she'd been able to speak it in his language, and unable to help himself, Scholar thought _perfect_.

    "I give you my word that I will attack no Lantean in Atlantis," he answered slowly, holding her eyes. It had been so long since he had deliberately opened his mind to another that he found he hardly remembered how. She held out her right hand and he clasped her forearm, though the gesture was rendered both awkward and less meaningful by the brace and the cuffs.

    "I am inclined to believe you, implausible as I find the idea." It sounded as though the admission cost her something, if only to herself.

    "Thank you," Scholar said sincerely, and once again gave her the deep bow due a queen. She nodded in answer, and turned to go, pausing only to lay a small shining object on the desk. Once she had gone, Scholar approached the desk and picked up the key carefully.

    "Teyla Emmagan." He had no idea what it meant, of course, but it damned well had better be something regal. He spoke it aloud to test the sound of it and smiled at the echoes. He had never chosen a queen before; most wraith didn't. Carter was not and never would be his queen, but he could follow Teyla Emmagan.

   

    That night (he thought) Scholar dreamed of loneliness so strong it felt like a person in the room with him, real and painful. It twisted at his insides and he curled around it to keep it from escaping, palms pressed tight against himself to hold it in. It had been so long since he had let himself feel the entirety of anything that a part of him wondered if it wasn't a delayed-reaction going mad.

    It wasn't until after he awoke, gasping, that it occurred to Scholar he shouldn't have been dreaming at all.


	5. Chapter 5

He slept and woke a few more times after that. Between the two warring paranoias in his head, that he was being constantly watched and that they had forgotten about him, the latter was swiftly becoming the stronger. The lights in the room rose when he did, and the light outside the window never changed at all from the careful dim, so it was impossible for Scholar to tell how long he had been there. He'd finished the name book fairly quickly. It made for dull re-reading and the incomplete retrovirus project data made for absolutely maddening re-reading, so Scholar gave up on that fairly quickly. 

The devices in the smaller room, as it turned out, were all water-based. Their purposes had eluded him for a while, but once Scholar remembered Atlantis was built for human and near-human people, things became much clearer. The largest of the devices emitted water in a spray from the ceiling at a variety of temperatures. Much less efficient a cleaning procedure than a hive's sonic showers, but if the Alterans and the Earth people wanted to waste water, then let them waste water. 

Scholar wasted some water on their behalf, then, mostly for lack of anything better to do. It was a refreshing experience to have clean hair again, though the rectangles of cloth beside the shower proved unpleasant in the extreme to actually use.

When he crossed back into the larger room Ronon was sitting on his bed, flicking through the baby name book, and Scholar wanted to weep. He came to a halt instead, when Ronon looked up at him grimly and raised a hand.

"Hey," Ronon opened.

"They really didn't execute you." The bark of a laugh startled Scholar, who walked forward until he was nearly as close to Ronon as he wanted to be, knees brushing the seated human's. Gingerly, Ronon's left hand uncurled Scholar's right, refusing to flinch away even as Scholar was helpless to stop his feeding apparatus twitching and trying to complete the wraith kiss.  The sound he made at the press of Ronon's palm was half sigh and half purr. If Ronon was unnerved or disgusted by the mouthing of the feeding slit against his hand, he didn't show it. 

"They're wimps," Ronon said at last, and it was Scholar's turn to have a laugh startled out of him. "They still don't want me in here but they can't think of a good reason, so they just let me in."

"I'm glad." He smiled. "I don't know how much longer I can take being alone  _ and _ still before I lose my mind." At that, Ronon's hand fell from his hand to his leg, rubbing cautiously. Scholar blinked. "How long—?

"This is week four." Ronon tugged and Scholar sat beside him, curled against his human warmth. He was distantly aware of the urge to crack open Ronon's sternum and drink his life, but it was, as ever, secondary to the urge to keep Ronon alive as long as physically possible and then some. "There are guards outside." Scholar removed his hand from its traversal of Ronon's thigh and made a concerted effort to stop purring, though he couldn't bring himself to raise his head from Ronon's shoulder, and Ronon made no further moves to dislodge him. 

"I really need to see the rest of the research on the retrovirus." He would take it, he decided, as soon as it seemed even a little safe. The idea of a life without hunger was an immensely seductive one, and so what if it did shorten his life span? For a wraith, eight thousand years was not such a long one, but it felt very long to Scholar. The thought that he would significantly outlive the human who seemed to be his only friend was very disturbing. 

"I'll get it." Ronon kissed his hair, and Scholar sighed. "I think they meant to give you it earlier, but Teyla got captured and things have been... Not great."

"Teyla Emmagan was captured?" 

"By Michael."

"Who's Michael?" It was Ronon's turn to sigh, and his soft noise sounded a lot less happy than Scholar's had. 

"I really need to get you that research. Michael was the one they tested the retrovirus on." Scholar grimaced. "Well, the first one."

"Willing?"

"No." 

Scholar hissed. In the language the humans could not quite grasp, it was very rude. Beside him, Ronon's loose limbs tightened as the human pulled minutely away from the (to him) incoherent sounds of fury. 

"They could have found a willing partner, but I bet they didn't even  _ try _ ."

"No." Ronon stood, and crossed the room, and Scholar was too angry to follow him even though the human's absence left him cold and gnawed by a persistent loneliness. 

"You said he was the first. How many were there?" Ronon's spine straightened, his gaze somewhere around the ceiling. " _ How many _ ?"

"A hive. A hive ship." Scholar hissed again, feeling his claws tear into the bedding. Better the bedding than Ronon, though he doubted even as angry as he was that he'd let himself harm the human. Still, so  _ many _ wraith, lost and confused and weakened, turned into animals for the humans' experimentation. Some might claim it was reciprocity, no more than they deserved, but Scholar, who liked to think he held humans in the same regard he held other wraith, found it unnerving in the extreme. 

"And did it take? For any of them, did the changes stay?"

"No."

"Of—"

"Not entirely. None of them stayed human but Michael's still a little... He got rid of his feeding thing."

" _ He _ did?" Scholar didn't miss where the action belonged. 

"Yeah. After, he changed back, like the rest, but his queen said he was too human and wouldn't take him in."

"And he was too wraith for the Lanteans." Ronon turned to look at him, finally, his expression difficult for Scholar to interpret. 

"Yeah."

"So—?"

"So he turned off his ability to feed, poisoned the stock for everyone else and is trying to turn all the wraith in the galaxy like him." Scholar clicked his fingers and hissed, this time excitedly.

"Which is why he wants Teyla Emmagan!" Ronon elegantly shrugged one shoulder. 

"I guess."

"The benefits of the wraith phenotype without the weakness—the feeding need. Of course he wants her, she's come halfway in the opposite direction. They can meet in the middle." When he met Ronon's eyes again, they were dark, the human's hand resting on the handle of his gun. 

"Sound a little eager, there."

"Of course I am. He's apparently accomplished what I was trying to by approaching it the wrong way around. I never would have thought of it. He sounds brilliant."

"His methods are inhumane."

"So are the Lanteans', and the Lanteans are human," Scholar snapped, baring his teeth at Ronon. "Do not tell me how he was kidnapped and excised from his hive and then complain that he has become cruel. You can't possibly know what that kind of loneliness does to a wraith."

"You don't even know him!" Ronon was close now, though not in a way Scholar liked, and he found himself standing as well. "How can you def—"

" _ Because I do know _ . I do know that kind of loneliness." Ronon stepped back, and belatedly Scholar realized he had been snarling. "If they had let him he would have loved the Lanteans and been as loyal as a  _ dog _ to the end of his days, but they kicked him out and forced him into a corner with his teeth to the world!"

"How do you know that?" Scholar stopped dead. It was a genuine question, Ronon's eyes wide and startled. 

"Because I dreamed it," he breathed finally, and felt at last the rill of pressure against his mind that he should have noticed before. "I've been picking up his dreams. Dreaming with him."

"Can you use them to find him?" Scholar stared.

"Of course I can."

"But?" Ronon asked, and Scholar was immensely gratified to know that Ronon knew him well enough to recognize that was not the end of it.

"But I won't. Because the Lanteans will punish him, and I don't understand why because you want what he wants. I want what he wants. If the rest of the wraith were smarter, they'd want it, too."

"He has Teyla." That did make Scholar pause. He may have met Teyla Emmagan all of once, but she represented his greatest success, something he thought he'd never see. Their greatest success, really. He would accept her as his queen, and she was something not unlike their great grandchild, his and that other whose name and face his mind shied away from. 

"You should trade," Scholar said at last. "Me for her." 

"Why?"

"Because I want to be traded. Because I can help him more than she can, since I wrote the template he's trying to extract. I remember it. Because we all want the same thing, but you're all too paranoid to work with him."

"And why would he accept?" There was a considering look about Ronon, but he didn't seem happy, which was fine with Scholar. If Ronon had seemed happy about the trade, he expected he might have been a little upset. 

"Because I can help. And because he's alone." 

"He also kidnapped the entire surviving population of Teyla's homeworld and turned them part wraith." 

Scholar didn't know how to respond to that, but Ronon seemed serious. Then again, Ronon usually did.

" _ Really _ ?" He asked, and Ronon nodded, tight-lipped and unamused. "All the more reason to trade. I don't approve of unwilling participants of any species, and Michael doesn't really need them, not if he's trying to turn wraith more human. What he needs is—"

" _ You _ ?" Ronon cut in unhappily.

"—mathematical projections," Scholar continued regardless, but. Ronon wasn't wrong. "And me."

"You want him to experiment on you." Ronon picked Scholar's hands and turned them over, stroking down Scholar's palms with his thumbs. Between wraith it would have been a strikingly intimate gesture, and Scholar suspected that even though he had never said as much to Ronon, the human knew. 

"I want what he has. I want all of us, all the wraith to have it, because I think we will only stop culling human planets when we have to. And this, this will kill so many fewer wraith than strengthening humans would have." 

"You want him," Ronon said at last, and Scholar closed his hands over Ronon's wrists before the human could pull away. 

"I want him to stop screaming at me from across the galaxy."

"I don't like it." Scholar shrugged.

"You don't have to." Ronon leaned in and kissed him, in the human way, and Scholar pressed their right palms tight together in an approximation of a wraith kiss, the teeth of the feeding apparatus latching on and drawing blood though it couldn't and he wouldn't draw life from Ronon. 

"I'll ask Sheppard," Ronon said, and turned to go.

"Wait." Ronon did, though he didn't turn. "I picked a name. Call me Schuyler." 

"Schuyler," Ronon repeated, looking at Scholar over his shoulder, and Scholar grinned. "Okay."

 

Colonel Carter agreed readily, something Scholar tried not to read too deeply into. If she was eager to get rid of him, he didn't blame her. If she was eager to get Teyla Emmagan back, then he didn't blame her for that, either. So was he, even if he wouldn't be seeing Teyla Emmagan again. He could feel the hunger he'd been trying to ignore clawing at his breastbone, making his temper short and his claws twitch. Even though Carter agreed, it took a day for her to obtain permission from  _ her _ superiors, which Scholar didn't understand. They offered him his knives and coat, which he declined, preferring to keep the Earth uniform as a sort of reminder of his divided loyalties, for himself as well as for Michael. Or whatever his name really was.

When the call came from Earth and Scholar finally got permission to call out to Michael, it was easier than he'd thought it might be. It had been so many years since he had tried to dream aloud that a part of him was afraid he'd lost the knack, laying on his back on his bed after the humans had gotten tired of watching him do nothing and let themselves be herded out by Ronon. Once he closed his eyes in the silence, though, it was all too easy to find the thin filament of connection and  _ tug _ , until he felt surprise that wasn't his own, and an answering  _ tug _ .

_ my name is scholar _ , he told the other wraith, felt shockworryfear, and latched on as Michael tried to withdraw.  _ i'm an ally of the lanteans. i want to trade for teylaemmagan. _ Anger. Ronon's hands, cruel and painful, not in a good way. Teyla wielding sticks with deadly precision. Sheppard, face set behind a gun, face cracked open in cruel smiles behind the controls of a dart fighter.

_ why would i trade _ , the other wraith asked, laced with pain. Scholar wanted to soothe him, but all his gentle memories were of Ronon, and those wouldn't do at all. 

_ i want to help. i want what you do. i performed the experiments _ . Scholar remembered the twisting projections of the human DNA, remembered the links unzipping and then, toward what he couldn't have known was the end and ever so slightly, recombining. Changing. Two generations of human experimental subjects, winnowed and winnowed until finally Teyla Emmagan. Threads of gold piercing the veil of mistrust. Hope.

_ i want them to suffer _ . Teyla Emmagan again, screaming. McKay, draped in his own entrails. Cheap and false as holograms. Any child would have known it for a lie.

_ you want to stop suffering, _ Scholar chided him gently.  _ i want you to stop suffering. i want everyone to stop suffering. i want the culling to stop. i want a home. _ Although he could feel the other wraith try to hold it back, his own message echoed and magnified like ripples through still water.  _ want a home _ . 

_ my name is Lastlight _ , the other wraith told him, and then showed him where they would meet, and where he would release Teyla Emmagan to her friends. 

**Author's Note:**

> Hey thanks for reading the first part of the OC fic. Wild.   
> There's a lot of ships and sidebars to this story, and I don't know how many of them I'm going to hit and to what depth, but here we are.   
> Expect more wraith.  
> Let me know if you want any more of this out of me.


End file.
